Louise Glück

United States Poet Laureate (2003–2004)
Winner of the National Book Award & Pulitzer Prize

Louise Glück is one of America’s finest contemporary poets. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Glück is a former Poet Laureate of the United States and the author of a dozen widely acclaimed books. Stephen Dobyns, writing in the New York Times Book Review, said “no American poet writes better than Louise Glück, perhaps none can lead us so deeply into our own nature.” Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Hass has called her “one of the purest and most accomplished lyric poets now writing.”
Evocative and lyrically graceful, Glück's work is noted for its emotional intensity and technical precision. Her language, staunchly straightforward, is clear and refined, so-much-so one does "not see the intervening fathoms.” Glück's considerable accomplishments as a poet are apparent in her latest volume, Poems: 1962-2012. Her new collection of poems, Faithful and Virtuous Night, won the 2014 National Book Award for Poetry.

Glück's recent books are A Village Life (2009), which was shortlisted for the International Griffin Poetry Prize, and Averno (2006), which was nominated for the National Book Award, won the L.L. Winship/PEN New England Award, and was listed by The New York Times Book Review as one of the 100 Notable Books of the Year.

Her earlier work includes The Seven Ages (2001); Vita Nova (1999), winner of The New Yorker Magazine’s Book Award in Poetry; Meadowlands (1996); The Wild Iris (1992), which received the Pulitzer Prize and the Poetry Society of America's William Carlos Williams Award; Ararat (1990), which received the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry; and The Triumph of Achilles (1985), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award, Boston Globe Literary Press Award, and the Poetry Society of America's Melville Kane Award. The First Four Books of Poems (1999) collects the early work that helped establish Glück as one of America's most original poets. Her book of essays, Proofs and Theories (1994), was awarded the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction.

In 2003, Glück was named the twelfth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry by the Library of Congress. That same year, she was named the judge for the Yale Series of Younger Poets, and served in that position through 2010.

In addition to the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award, Glück has received many honors. In 2001, she was awarded the Bollingen Prize, given biennially for a poet's lifetime achievement. And in 2008, Glück received the Wallace Stevens Award for “outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry.” Other honors include the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, Sara Teasdale Memorial Prize, M.I.T. Anniversary Medal, the Pushcart Prize, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2015 she was awarded the Gold Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Glück taught at Williams College for 20 years and is currently Rosenkranz writer-in-residence at Yale University. She is a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and in 1999 was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

"There are few living poets whose new poems one always feels eager to read. Louise Glück ranks at the top of the list. Her writing's emotional and rhetorical intensity are beyond dispute."— The Washington Post

"Louise Glück is a poet of strong and haunting presence."— Helen Vendler, The New Republic

"Louise (Glück) sometimes uses language so plain it can almost seem like someone is speaking to you spontaneously – but it’s always intensely distinguished."— Robert Pinsky